Time for paramedic licenses?

The introduction of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) audits by the Health Professions Council (HPC) (2008) provided another step towards a truly ‘professional profession’. The reliance on in-house recertifcation courses provided by ambulance services raises concerns of the effcacy of ‘sheep-dip’ style education where the best, average and poorest clinicians underwent the same courses, irrespective of their learning need. Clearly an evolution which enabled professionals to continually develop their knowledge and skills, thus becoming more effective practitioners, was a determining moment. But has the paradigmatic shift in how we educate and check our registrants created a bias towards developing skills at the expense of good-quality current ones?

By design, CPD is a valuable part of any profession’s substrate; the principle of training a person to the standards required for registration and then using this base line to develop their knowledge in the ensuing years proffers a professional utopia. The HPC defnes CPD as ‘the way professionals continue to learn and develop throughout their careers so they keep their skills and knowledge up to date and are able to work safely, legally and effectively’ (HPC, 2012)